Mathematical Modeling of Public Opinion using Traditional and Social Media

With the growth of the internet, data from text sources has become increasingly available to researchers in the form of online newspapers, journals, and blogs. This data presents a unique opportunity to analyze human opinions and behaviors without soliciting the public explicitly. In this research, I utilize newspaper articles and the social media service Twitter to infer self-reported public opinions and awareness of climate change. Climate change is one of the most important and heavily debated issues of our time, and analyzing large-scale text surrounding this issue reveals insights surrounding self-reported public opinion. First, I inquire about public discourse on both climate change and energy system vulnerability following two large hurricanes. I apply topic modeling techniques to a corpus of articles about each hurricane in order to determine how these topics were reported on in the post event news media. Next, I perform sentiment analysis on a large collection of data from Twitter using a previously developed tool called the hedonometer . I use this sentiment scoring technique to investigate how the Twitter community reports feeling about climate change. Finally, I generalize the sentiment analysis technique to many other topics of global importance, and compare to more traditional public opinion polling methods. I determine that since traditional public opinion polls have limited reach and high associated costs, text data from Twitter may be the future of public opinion polling

Political Speech on Twitter: A Sentiment Analysis of Tweets and News Coverage of Local Gun Policy

While the gun debate has been one of America’s most politically contentious issues, Twitter has become, in recent years a popular venue for politicians to carry out the debate. The present thesis is aimed at better understanding of political speech on Twitter, as well as the ways in which political frames and sentiment on Twitter differ from those of news media coverage regarding gun policy in the state of Arkansas. The study uses framing theory, which assumes that both news media and individuals use frames to construct perceptions and narratives about issues. Adopting an automated content analysis as a method, the study examined 354 gun-related tweets downloaded from the Twitter accounts of three Arkansas politicians (Charlie Collins, Denise Garner, and Greg Leding) and 40 news articles about gun policy involving these politicians from three local newspapers. The results indicated that state politicians’ discourse on Twitter constituted of a variety of extremely polarized words and frames pertaining and appealing to the core values of their local constituents, while local newspapers’ frames were very fact-based and unbiased. The results also showed that political sentiment on Twitter was extremely negative, fearful, and agitated, while news media expressed a very neutral sentiment in their coverage of gun policy, suggesting a new venue for further investigation of current assumptions about the negative nature of news tone

THE BEGINNING OF THE END? THE LEGACY OF 21st CENTURY PARTISANSHIP ON THE PRACTICE OF U.S. DEMOCRACY

The first years of the 21st century have been marked by an increasingly extreme hyperpartisan environment, gripping the federal government and its legislative representatives. The result has been an increasingly ineffectual U.S. Congress, for which public approval ratings are at record lows and frustrations seemingly at all-time highs. The following chapters will examine how this hyperpartisan environment has either hastened or enabled fundamental changes/shifts in the practice of U.S. democracy. Each chapter will examine a change or challenge through the lens of a high-priority issue (gun control, immigration, and marijuana prohibition), issues for which there is intense public pressure for a policy response. In each case, policy that Congress has been unwilling, or unable, to produce. As the people’s branch, Congress should represent and reflect the will of their constituents. Despite growing (and in some cases overwhelming) bipartisan public support of particular policy reforms, Congress remains stalemated. However, the conclusions of this portfolio prove more complex than anticipated. Ultimately, although hyperpartisanship is now a factor in policy stalemate, it appears it is as much a symptom of broader issues as it is a cause. Certain aspects of, and evolutions in, the system’s design have exacerbated a problem that has always existed - people just don’t always agree. As the “People’s Branch,” Congress is also both representative and reflective of this phenomenon